Backers of a new initiative to reconsider the nation’s drinking age argue that the current age of 21, essentially mandated by Congress in 1984 and accepted in all 50 states by 1988, has contributed to the problem of binge drinking on college campuses. A petition to that effect has been signed by 129 college presidents and chancellors, among 2,000 who began receiving it in July.
Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman said through a spokesperson that the call for a lowered drinking age deserves thoughtful consideration, though it is not Princeton’s policy to sign petitions. R. Barbara Gitenstein, president of The College of New Jersey, issued an e-mail saying that she has seen no convincing evidence to support changing the current legal drinking age of 21.
At Rider University, spokesperson Daniel Higgins said there would be no comment because of pending litigation, stemming from the alcohol poisoning death of a freshman during a fraternity initiation last spring.
It strikes us as significant, though painful, that the death at Rider involved binge drinking by a student under the legal drinking age.
It also is significant that by 1994 — after six years of a uniform national drinking age of 21 — a study promoted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported that two-thirds of American college students, including those under 21, had used alcohol in the previous 30 days. The proportion was only a few percentage points lower for their non-college peers.
And it is significant that a survey of 1,877 high school seniors in the U.S., described in the journal Prevention Science last December, reported that 75 percent of them had at least tried alcohol. All of them, of course, were well under the legal drinking age of 21.
None of these statistics refutes the real risks of alcohol abuse to underage drinkers or the population at large. These include long-term addiction, lasting physical damage and danger to others in the form of highway deaths and other incidents. But neither do they argue for equating casual “social” drinking, campus binge drinking and alcoholism.
What the numbers do refute, however, is the premise that reviving Prohibition for some 10 million American adults has been a tenable public policy.
Yes, we said “adults” and will defend that term to anyone who cares to argue that the nation has decided to send “children” or “teenagers” into military combat, allow them to get married or invite them to help select the next president of the United States.
The peculiar conversion of what used to be called “the age of majority” into a three-year probation period for people who have otherwise entered adulthood seems fanciful, however well-intended. Asking colleges and universities to bear the legal brunt of policing such folly is unrealistic and unfair.
We may sometimes think it unfair that we have a mere 18 years to turn our children into responsible adults. But those years include the ones during which attitude and practice toward alcohol are formed. After that, whether young men or women leave home for college or full-time employment, it is too late for training wheels.

